Differences in Experienced and Novice Counselors' Knowledge Structures About Clients: Implications for Case Conceptualization

Concept mapping tasks (CMTs) and association tasks were used to examine knowledge structures about clients. Four experienced and 5 novice counselors read a counseling transcript, categorized client statements, and mapped the relationships among categories. Cluster analyses revealed that novice counselors (a) had more concept categories and (b) formed categories based on the temporal order of client statements. Structural features of CMTs indicated that novice counselors constructed simplistic, hierarchical representations containing few reciprocal links between categories. Experienced counselors were faster than novices at completing some of the tasks. These results support the information-processing perspective with novice counselors attending to surface detail and requiring greater time to process information, which may be indicative of their less developed schemas and skills related to structuring client information.